Pages

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

If you have $20 minutes and 20 minutes, you can pull off a pretty, last-minute Thanksgiving tablescape with just a few items from the grocery store:

A bouquet of Thanksgiving-colored flowers: $10.00

6 pears: $2.00

8-oz Mason jars: $8.00

Cut the flowers so the blooms are just sticking out of the jelly jars, and place the little vases at even intervals down the length of your table. The jelly jars are not only pretty, rustic, cheap, and reusable for a variety of things (I'm using the rest to serve a seasonal cocktail), but they're also low enough that folks can see each other across the table.

Choose pears with a flat-ish bottom (so they can stand up) and a long stem, if you'd like to use them to affix name tags. I used forelle pearsbecause they have a pretty deep-red and sage-speckled hue.

Either place the pears between each of the jelly jars along the center of the table or use them as place settings on top of the plates.

Extras: Handmade name tags, pretty ribbon, rosemary sprigs tucked around the pears (you might already have rosemary in the house if you're making a turkey!)

Sunday, November 13, 2016

My close friend and I took this picture on Election Day. We posted it on Facebook with a cutesy caption. It
was my idea.

We had just voted for different candidates at the same polling place, and taken our
little girls out for ice cream sundaes afterwards. How beautiful, how very American, it would be, we thought, to
stand together, shoulder-to-shoulder, and graciously and humbly declare
ourselves friends and sisters on such a divisive day.

I was giddy with happiness and hope. I had just cast a
ballot for a woman who I’ve admired practically my entire life. I had waited
for her to be my president for 20 years. I sat in the disabled-access polling
box with my little girl and we smiled as I filled in that little bubble with
her name next to it.

I must say, it’s a lot easier to be gracious and humble when
you’re sure you’re going to win.

This week has been a test for me. I grew up in a bubble,
grew up believing certain things. I was taught that it was not OK to judge
someone by the color of their skin, what religion they practice or don’t practice,
their physical appearance or abilities, or who they love. I took these things
for granted as truths, “universally acknowledged,” to quote Jane Austen. When I
read Harry Potter to myself and to my daughter, the idea of “Muggle-Born
Registries” seemed to be an allegory for distant events, far-removed from the beautiful
and inclusive America of the 21st Century. A good reminder for
history.

Now we’re flirting with such ideas today. I think everyone
can agree, it’s chilling.

Do I believe that my friend, and indeed, even most of our
new president-elect’s supporters have hatred and racism in their hearts?

No.

I don’t believe that. I can’t. It would be too much to bear.
But I believe that the handful of those who do
have hatred in their hearts now have permission for those feelings to be
normalized, vocalized, and even acted upon. Now it’s up to Trump and his supporters
who don’t feel this way to loudly denounce such words and actions. They’re the
only ones who can do so effectively.

I’m white, middle-class, educated, employed, heterosexual, and
live in the Northeast. Despite my heartache, my bubble is intact. Yet I do fear
for those people who are more vulnerable than I am, including my little girl,
who has a physical disability. The world has never been a particularly hospitable
or easy place for the differently-abled, but we’ve come so far. Just 30 years
ago, when I was her age, my daughter’s life would have been so different. I can’t
watch that progress erode away.

But I also think back to where I was one year ago: In the hospital
after my daughter had what can only be described as a terrible surgery with a
painful, months-long recovery. Who came into my home, without hesitation, bearing
food and craft projects, to sit by her side and talk me off the ledge when we
had a hospital bed in our living room and my daughter couldn’t sleep for more
than 30 minutes at a stretch? My friend in the above picture. Who makes sure
that every pathway—literally and metaphorically—is cleared when my daughter is
in her care? My friend in the above picture. Who was the first to donate a big,
generous box of art supplies when I was collecting them for Boston Children’s
Hospital? My friend in the above picture.

And who promised me, in the days following the election,
when I was heartbroken and terrified, that she would be by my side, always fighting
for what is right on my daughter’s behalf? I think you can guess.

Already, I’m seeing people in my life who are saying, “We might
have different opinions about some things, but not the big things. I stand with
you.” For that, I’m so grateful. May others who are marginalized also be so
lucky, and may those who supported Trump be as brave and outspoken as my friend
to tell the people who they love, “I stand with you,” my Muslim friend, my gay
friend, my black friend, my immigrant friend.

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

The view from the stunning Grace Bay Club in
Providenciales, Turks and Caicos

On our last night on Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI for
short), we drove away from the gorgeous Grace Bay Club resort to have dinner at Bugaloo’s, a wooden conch shack that’s as
popular with locals as it is with visitors. Bugaloo’s is perched at the edge of
a bay in an area of Providenciales island called Five Cays Settlement, where
little fishing boats bob gently with the tide and jetties piled with rocks
and conch shells extend across the sand.

We
arrived after sundown, when the restaurant’s open-air deck was packed with
people and ringed with palm trees strung with white lights. Across the sand, a
band played a mix of traditional music and island-infused pop hits.

The band plays at Bugaloo's.

Other performers wowed the crowd with tricks. One spun a flaming wheel on his foot
and balanced weird combinations of items on his head, like a plastic deck chair
and stacks of glass bottles. Another, dubbed “TCI James Brown,” took the stage
in a glittering, sequined red jacket and danced frenetically, channeling the
Godfather of Soul as he jerked and shimmied across the stage to songs like “Papa’s
Got a Brand New Bag” and “I Got You.”

Couples danced barefoot in the sand. A little girl, who looked about 4, spun in
gleeful circles on the deck, pumping her tiny fists and stomping her feet, just
a little off the beat. A mangy, stray “potcake” dog—a mongrel breed found only
on TCI and the Bahamas that’s named after the cooking-pot dregs that the locals
feed them—hobbled between the tables, in search of food scraps and ear
scratches.

This potcake wouldn't stay still long enough for a decent
picture of his cute and crazy face.

It was a happy night. We ordered a silly amount of traditional
island food, filling the table with plates for the five of us to
share—coconut-fried shrimp; fried spiny lobster; rich, pepper-flecked mac and
cheese; cool, crunchy cole slaw; peas and rice (which in the U.S. we might call
rice and beans); and conch every which way: fresh and citrusy scorched conch;
conch salad; cracked conch; crispy coconut conch; and conch fritters. We drank pleasantly
bitter Turks Head beer, an island brew, and passed plates heavy with food, urging each other
to “Try this!” We unabashedly ordered second helpings of mac and cheese. We
gasped and applauded as the performer “ate” fire and sang along with the band.

Our delicious spread of fried everything.

I loved the amber beer; my new buddy Nick
opted for the lager.

I've always wondered how someone first discovers
they have a talent for balancing stuff on their face.

Later, I walked across the deck to look at a small jewelry
stall that stood adjacent to the restaurant and noticed TCI James Brown sitting
on a stool a few feet away. He put out his hand for me to shake, and I took it.
Before long, we were deep in conversation, with him regaling me with stories
about his life, his fame, his friends around the world, meeting "The Godfather" himself (James Brown), and his philosophy on aging
(In a nutshell: Never retire). I’m not really sure how the conversation strayed
that way, but I listened to his stream-of-consciousness chatter, only asking the
occasional question. His eccentricity was apparent, and so was his genuineness.

“Hate and poison sound the same,” he opined. “But love
sounds good.”

I nodded, unsure about what to say. Yes, love does sound
good.

Aren’t people interesting and funny?

This is my favorite part of traveling. I believe with all my
heart that the world would be an infinitely better, more generous, and more
understanding place if everyone had a passport and eagerly filled the pages
with stamps. They’d discover that the world is both exhilaratingly enormous and
humblingly small. They’d discover that most people are good and are trying
their best, and that everyone wants someone to listen to them. They’d discover
that all of these good people live their lives a little bit differently (sometimes
a lot differently) but in many ways—the most important ways—we’re really all exactly the same. We all get zits and
headaches. We accidentally swear in front of our kids when we stub a toe. We
share meals with family and sometimes have a few too many glasses of wine. We
laugh so hard we can’t breathe (and maybe pee a little). We love our kids more
than life itself and stare up at the stars and find pictures.

We are not alone in the world, which to me, is an exciting
and comforting thought. I love the far-flung beaches and new flavors that come
with traveling, but when I get home the moments that tend to stick with me most
are the conversations with people whose paths I never would have crossed unless
one of us stepped onto a plane and into each other’s lives, at least
temporarily.

It’s a little piece of magic that I hope to chase all across the
world. It's a healthy reminder that we're all in this thing together. And it gives you a chance to do stuff like this:

Saturday, July 16, 2016

I would venture to say that not many people—not many
American people, anyway—have a picture of their grandmother on a camel, but I
do, and it’s a beauty. Everything about it says mid-1980s grandma, from the
permed hair, to the thick glasses, to the sensible tan walking shoes. Except,
of course, for the fact that she’s perched precariously atop a camel, a look of
sheer delight, and maybe a little astonishment, radiating off her face.

Polly’s life wasn’t always easy, for more reasons than could
possibly fit into a blog post. But when she retired from decades working at the
phone company, she hit the road, and I don’t mean she spent a week sunning
herself at the Old Ladies’ Village in Florida. She grabbed her passport and
packed her bags for a whirlwind trip to Spain, Portugal, and Morocco.

I was 5 or 6 when she went, and boy did it make an
impression on me, her jetting off to these exotic places across the ocean. And I’ll
never forget her pulling from her bag the souvenirs she brought home for me: A
bright red fan from Spain, and from Portugal, a beautiful blouse of deep indigo,
intricately embroidered with poppy-red colored flowers around a scooped
neckline.

But maybe the best gift of all was the one she brought home for
herself: That photo of her atop the camel. It was taken on the day that her
tour group ventured across the Strait of Gibraltar for a quick jaunt to Morocco
from Spain.

“Who wants to ride a camel?” the guide asked her and her fellow American
retiree travelers.

Crickets. No takers.

This was silly, Polly thought. No
one?

“I’ll do it!” she boldly called out. Maybe it was because she
actually wanted to ride a camel, or maybe because her Yankee practicality was
scolding her for traveling all the way to North Africa and not riding a camel when given the chance.

So she climbed up, and a friend captured the moment on my
grandmother’s camera. Polly kept that picture in a frame on her living room
shelf until she died a quarter century later.

When she died, my family and I performed the quiet and
cathartic task of cleaning out her apartment. She kept strange things, like wrinkled squares of used wrapping paper, that signaled her waste-not, Depression-era upbringing, and
most of what we found was given away or thrown away. But we all wanted a copy
of that picture of her on the camel.

I was also delighted to find another
little souvenir of hers from that trip: A wine bottle stopper that's topped with a
brightly painted rooster, the word “Portugal” written in delicate script around the edge. The
cork is unused and unblemished—Polly wasn’t a drinker—but something about it
must’ve struck her enough to bring it home and never use it for what it was
made for.

I loved that little rooster (as a kid, and now), and these days, it sits in my kitchen
on a little side table in a pie plate. I don’t stop wine bottles with it, and it’s too small
to really hang anywhere. I keep it for myself, because it’s pretty and it makes
me smile.

That trip of hers ignited my own desire to hit the road, and
when I do, I like to bring back kitchen trinkets of my own, like the sage-colored
glass bottle of Puglian olive oil from Southern Italy, and the small, rustic
wooden bowl from Santa Fe, painted with an image of San Pasqual, the patron saint
of cooks and kitchens.

And whenever I feel anxious about traveling (which is every
time; I might be a frequent traveler, but I am always a nervous one), it helps
me to imagine her voice, calling out into the hot, desert air, “I’ll do it!”

Polly, Haverhill High School senior portrait

“Do one thing every
day that scares you.” -Eleanor Roosevelt

Monday, July 4, 2016

I have eaten enough mussels and clams over my 35 New England
summers to recognize the distinctive and unpleasant crunch of a bivalve
with a belly full of sand. But last night was different: When I bit down on an orangey mussel, I felt not the crunch of sand between my teeth, but something
hard and solid, like a rock, and spit out,

“A pearl!” I exclaimed to Brian and our friends who were
joining us for dinner. “I found a pearl in my mussel!”

Actually, I found two pearls

I marveled at it, snapped its picture and passed it around—no
one seemed to mind that it had just been in my mouth. It was a dainty thing,
but pretty, and large enough to maybe be called a seed pearl. I immediately
started to wonder whether I could somehow wear it as a necklace. A few minutes later, I bit down on a second, smaller one.

Pearls
are formed, as most of us know, by an irritant that sneaks its way into
a mollusk's soft body. As a defense mechanism, the animal adds layers of the
same substances it uses to make its shell until eventually, a lustrous pearl
forms. That something beautiful could grow from the unexpected and
unwelcome is a lovely idea. May we all be so resourceful as to make pearls from
pain, to make lemonade from lemons.

Lately, our personal pearls have come in the form of our family and friends,
who rallied around us this winter after Chloe’s latest surgery. I’ve written
about it before, and she’s had surgery before, but this one was particularly rough,
and I can’t stop thinking about it. We have had a humbling amount of help from
family and friends over the past few months; so much that I get overwhelmed
with emotion knowing that I could never, ever repay them all or thank them
adequately.

Instead we’re left to simply enjoy their company, and that’s
what we did this weekend, when we had our friends and their little girl over for
a July 4th clambake in our backyard. We had a sprinkler and
sparklers; clams and mussels and grilled corn laid out over newspaper; and s’mores
by the fire. And in the midst of it all, I bit down on something hard and spit
out a pearl. Happy Fourth of July!

Sunday, June 26, 2016

I was unpacking toys from boxes in Chloe’s new playroom when
a warm, sweet-smelling breeze floated across my face through the open window.
It smelled so good that it stopped me in my tracks, and I looked out the window
to see where it might be coming from.

I got the answer right away: A tall, flowering shrub with
delicate white blossoms that was blooming right outside. I hadn’t noticed it
until then. Had it just flowered? I wasn’t sure, but it was beautiful, and it
smelled so good, like a pure, clean summer perfume.

I know nothing about plants except how to swiftly kill
them, so I asked everyone who came to visit what these gorgeous flowers were
called. There were lots of guesses, but I finally got the answer from my
mother-in-law, Sharon, a gardening whiz who could grow plump, voluptuous roses
in a cardboard box filled with gravel. The beautiful mystery flower was called
was mock orange.

Over the next few days, I found myself just standing in
Chloe’s playroom, hoping to catch that heavenly smell on a breeze again, or
else standing outside in the front yard, burying my face in the flowers. I
couldn’t see the flowers from inside the house unless I was standing right in
the playroom window, and it made me a little sad.

Meanwhile, Chloe has been getting prodigiously filthy every
single day the backyard, where a wooden swing-set sits in a little sandy
clearing under some pine and maple trees. Every day she plays outside, and
every night, she comes into the house with her sneakers filled with sand, and with
dirt ringed around her neck and ankles and caked under her fingernails.

Her crutches are taking a beating, too, and it shows.
They’re being sprayed with sticky, smelly mosquito repellant, and carrying her
over grass, dirt, sand, puddles, mud, and all other manner of messy terrain. In
a week or two, they’ll make their first appearance on the beach, first at a
local lake, and then later, at the seashore, where the sun and saltwater and
sand will continue to bleach away their already faded hot pink hue. The
crutches’ rubber tips (which I’ve already replaced once) will get worn flat
again and again, like old, bald tires on a car. A plastic piece of the crutch
cuff recently snapped off in my hand, too.

Strictly speaking, actually, her crutches aren’t meant for
this sort of thing. They’re not supposed to get dirty or filled with grit and
sand, and they’re certainly not supposed to get wet. They’re made of metal and
plastic. They’re meant to be kept clean and dry, used on safe, flat, surfaces.
In school. At the library. At physical therapy. At the mall. To get in and out
of the car or the house.

In other words, quiet, clean places where not too much
happens. But what almost-7-year-old kid wants a life that’s quiet,
clean, and boring? I want her play in the hot sand and jump through frothy
waves. I want her to stomp in puddles and squash her feet through mud. I want
her to pick her way down a pine-needle carpeted path in the woods.

What I don’t want is to follow her around chanting a chorus of
“don’ts:” Don’t walk there, don’t get dirty, don’t get wet. Her crutches are
meant to open up the world to her, not take her only to the edges of all the
places she’s not allowed to go. What’s the point of having crutches at all if
she isn’t going to use them to really live?

And so she gets them wet and dirty and I don’t care. Which
brings me back to those lovely mock orange blossoms.

Chloe, my mom, and I spent Saturday morning at Canal Street
Antique Mall, an old, brick former mill building that's filled with two cavernous floors of dusty antiques:
Stacks of doors, windows with rippled glass, heavy black typewriters,
cracked teapots, wind-up bell alarm clocks, ornate sewing machines, wire bird
cages, violins with broken strings, porcelain dolls with lacy collars and
dirty faces, a brown mink hat. Anything you can think of. I was looking for
stuff for the new house, and fell in love with a rustic black metal planter. I
knew exactly what I would use it for.

When I got home, I pulled a pair of heavy duty sheers from a
kitchen drawer and walked right outside to the mock orange blossoms. I clipped
three of the woody stalks, shook the blooms free of a few nectar-drinking bugs,
and arranged them in mason jars in the planter. They filled the kitchen with their
beautiful fragrance, and every time I look at the centerpiece, I smile.

Maybe you’re not supposed to clip the flowers from a decorative shrub. But who
is it there for, planted in the front of the house where I can’t see it or
smell it? Is it only for the benefit of neighbors or for strangers driving by?
Or is it for our pleasure, too?

Thursday, June 23, 2016

I have been—and let’s face it, probably will be again sooner
or later—the kind of hostess who sometimes can’t be bothered to dirty a bowl,
and will instead stoop to phenomenal laziness to avoid doing dishes. Once, I
opened a bag of salad and dropped it unceremoniously, with an ugly
cellophane-sounding splat, onto the kitchen table in front of my brother and
his lovely fiancé, who truly deserved more effort from me than just ripping
open the bag and calling it a night. After an evening of cooking, it seemed
that I just couldn’t bring myself to empty one more thing into one more bowl.

But here, in this new house, in this miraculous new kitchen,
even cleaning is fun, and every snack and meal deserves a beautiful and
thoughtful presentation, as though each morsel we put onto our plates and set
out onto our table needs to live up to these lustrous blue-gray granite
counters; this thick, golden wood butcher block slab; this gleaming six-burner,
commercial-grade stove that hisses to life with gas and fire and cooks to
absolute perfection. I would live in a tent if this stove were in it (and of course, the tent would promptly burst into flames, but, you know).

Last night we had my mother over for a simple dinner of
spaghetti and meatballs. It was not an occasion that warranted fanciness. After
all, you can let it all hang out with your mother, and I certainly do. I’m not
above running through the house in my ratty underwear while she’s visiting, or
sniffing my armpit and wondering out loud whether that stink is from forgetting
to put on deodorant or just power-sweating through it.

But this night was different. It was the first meal she was
having with us in this house, and Chloe and I had just come home from Cider
Hill Farm where our farm share bounty of eggs, jam, cider, lettuce, scallions,
and berries waited for us in the cool, dusty barn.

We left the farm that afternoon with fat, ripe, still-warm
strawberries that heaped out of their green paper pint box like deep red
jewels. The sky opened up just as we were leaving the farm, washing the yellow
pollen dust from my car’s windshield. But by the time we got home, the rain
clouds were blowing away to another neighborhood. Chloe and I ate grilled
cheese sandwiches and cherry tomatoes for lunch before turning our attention to
our evening’s dessert: Strawberry shortcake.

We spent the rest of the afternoon cutting butter into small
cubes, measuring flour and sugar, and patting dough onto the floured
countertop. I handed Chloe a biscuit cutter, one that had belonged to my stepmother’s
Southern-born grandma, Mildred, and showed Chloe how to dip the edges of the
cutter in a little mound of flour, push it straight down onto the dough, and
give it a little jiggle before pulling it up and out again. I told Chloe that
she was the fourth generation—or maybe more—to cut biscuits with that little
circle of metal. Her hand fit around it just right.

We put the sticky biscuits onto parchment-lined baking
sheets, and I slid them into the oven. As I did, Chloe snatched up the dough scraps
and balled them up. Almost instantly her fingers were stuck together, glued by
a dough that she quickly discovered was too sticky to play with.

The afternoon rain shower had given way to a bright blue evening
sky and radiant sunshine, so I dried the leftover puddles off of the picnic table
with an old, faded dishtowel and moved our dinner things outside.

After dinner on the deck, it was time for dessert. The
shortcakes and macerated strawberries were in utilitarian storage containers
with plastic covers, but for once, my instincts for avoiding dish duty were
silent. I piled the biscuits atop a turquoise glass cake stand with delicately
fluted edges and a hobnail base, and spooned the strawberries into a deep,
aubergine-hued Fiestaware bowl.

We ate those summer strawberries on the deck as the sun
dipped below the tall old pine trees that ring our new backyard, and I snatched
the whipped cream away from Chloe before she could plop an even more obscene mound of it
into her bowl.

Sunday, May 29, 2016

I’ve acquired many grown-up skills over the years—paying
bills on time, stain removal, feigning interest in conversations about
driving routes—but one of my very favorites is making pan sauces.

Creating a pan sauce out of little more than an ostensibly
dirty pan, a splash of wine, and a pat of butter is a little bit of magic. A
pan sauce transforms a boringly decent piece of meat into a next-level dinner,
and really, really makes you seem like a grown-up who Knows What She’s Doing
(in case you needed to prove it to anyone). Plus, making one sort of washes the
pan for you, too!

A brine is just a really, really salty liquid, and can be as
simple as water and salt if you’re in a pinch. But other liquids, like beer,
cider, and juice, plus fresh herbs, spices, or even sugars, can add more flavor.

Once you know the basic brine ratio—about one cup of liquid
to 1 tablespoon of salt—you can play around with the flavors you like and the
ingredients you have on hand to create one. This helps you to cook on the fly,
without a recipe, and without having to make a special trip to the grocery
store.

A nice brine for four boneless pork chops or sliced pork loin might be
two cans of beer or cider and a little less than a ¼ cup of salt. Peak into
your fridge and cabinets and think about other flavors you like: Maybe add a small
handful of whole peppercorns, whole cloves, a drizzle of molasses or maple
syrup, or a few sprigs of fresh thyme and rosemary.

Put the pork chops in a zip-top bag and dump the brine over
it. Squeeze out all the air, seal the bag, and kind of roll it around to make
sure the chops are covered. Put the bag in an empty bowl and refrigerate for at
least 30 minutes, but you can let it go for a few hours, too. In fact, you can
throw the brine together in 5 or 10 minutes before work and pop it out to cook
in less than 20 minutes when you get home.

When you’re ready to cook, pull out the chops and dry them
on a few paper towels. Put a sauté pan or Dutch oven over medium-high heat—don’t
use a nonstick pan, or you won’t be able to make your pan sauce!—and coat the
bottom with about 1-2 tablespoon of olive oil. When the pan and oil are hot,
add your pork chops to the pan. They’ll cook quickly, so don’t go anywhere or,
and for the love of Pete, don’t overcook them! About 5-7 minutes for the first
side, and 3-5 minutes for the other, or until the internal temperature is 140
degrees. Remove the chops to a plate and cover with some foil.

By the way, a nonstick pan won’t work because you want those
browned bits that stick to the pan (and make you think you have a lot of work
to do scraping and washing the pan after cooking). Those browned bits are the
base of your pan sauce.

Keep the pan over medium heat, and add about 1 cup of white
wine while whisking. As the wine heats up, use the whisk to scrape all those
brown bits off of the bottom of the pan (this is called deglazing). Cook for 2 or 3 minutes, and then add 1
tablespoon of butter and about ½ teaspoon of cornstarch mixed with ¼ cup of
cold water (mix the cornstarch and water BEFORE you add them to the pan, or you’ll
get Clumpfest USA).

By this time, the pork chops will have some
liquid pooled under them, so pour that into the pan, too. Cook and whisk for a
few more minutes, or until the sauce has thickened. You can add some chopped fresh
chopped herbs, too, if you want! It’s all very forgiving and easy to improvise.
Spoon the sauce across the pork chops, feel fancy, and enjoy!

Sunday, January 31, 2016

These humble little legumes are fat-free and packed—and I
mean PACKED—with protein, iron, and fiber. They’re ridiculously cheap, but
very filling, and unlike other dried legumes, don’t need to be soaked overnight before
you cook them. They can go from bag to pot to bowl in less than an hour.

Not all food has to be pretty. Although red lentils certainly are!

And lest you think that lentils are the totally boring,
C-SPANs of the food world, consider that a bag of lentils comes with an
exciting element of danger: Occasionally, rogue pebbles or dirt balls can sneak
in as stowaways and hide in the lentil bag.

A pebble and two dirtballs recently retrieved from a bag of lentils. Incidentally, "dirtball" is one of my favorite insults.

Which means you always have to comb
through lentils carefully before you cook them. I leave this job to my child, who
needs to earn her keep somehow.

Search those lentils! Pebbles break teeth!

This child recently had surgery, which made grocery store
runs and complex meals tough for a while. Since dried lentils are one of those
cheap staples that I always have on hand—they keep in the cupboard forever and cost
less than $2 per bag—lentil soup became an easy, go-to, weeknight meal during
her recovery. I nearly always had its other ingredients on hand, too, so I could
throw it together fast. The result is a quick, healthy, cheap, and hearty meal
that my daughter always gobbles up.

I keep my lentils in a big mason jar, as this crappy picture illustrates.I like to think of my blog pictures as charmingly bad, like primitive folk art.

There are so many recipes for lentil soup, and I’m sure
there are much better ones than mine, but this one is committed to memory and I
only have so much space in my brain. Besides, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

That said, though, there are lots of possible variations to the basic soup:

Add cubed ham, or put a leftover hambone into the soup as it
simmers.

Use dried, snipped mushrooms to give the soup a meatier
flavor but still keep it vegetarian/vegan.

Make it with water OR any kind of broth that you like or
have on hand. I often use the leftover, frozen chicken broth from making
chicken soup or chicken pot pie. Consider using no-salt added broth, so you can
salt it to your own taste later.

Sauté the veggies before adding the water or broth to deepen
the flavor; or let the raw veggies cook in the broth if you just want to leave
the pot on the stove and escape into latest issue of Us Weekly.

If you sauté the veggies first, you can use olive oil or
some bacon fat! (I sometimes enjoy knocking lentil soup off of its healthy high
horse)

Use any spices you like. Some ideas are a bay leaf, oregano,
parsley, and thyme. I also use a smoky and salty charcoal seasoning that I picked
up on a recent trip to Santa Fe.

Although some people like their lentil soup soupy (if you can think of a better way to phrase this, let me know) I prefer it more like a thick stew. To achieve that texture, I use an immersion blender:
Just stick it right in the pot and blend until it’s as thick as you want it to
be.

Today the kitchen, tomorrow the world!A decent immersion blender will only set you back $20 or $30,and is infinitely easier to blend soup with than a food processor.

Use kitchen scissors to snip tough dried mushrooms into small pieces.

Basic lentil soup

1 ½ cups of dried lentils (searched for debris and rinsed)

5 cups of water or broth

¾ cup of diced carrots

¾ cup of diced onion

Two cloves of minced garlic

Desired spices (about ½ teaspoon of each)

Gently sauté the carrots, onion, and garlic over medium-high
heat in two tablespoons of olive oil, bacon fat, or a mixture of the two until
the veggies are soft.

Add the lentils and stir for about one minute. Add optional dried mushrooms; ¼ cup of
porcini mushrooms are a good choice.